Fully agree.
Commenters who argue with you, suggesting that discussion is repetition, miss one thing: associativity of memory.
Discussing material, reading something tangential or in another aspect of the subject, all that makes more associations, not just simply repeat the same fact.
I had tried that 20 years ago learning a new language: after ~300 words, my brain could recall every word in the cards, but not in real text. At some point I looked a word in a dictionary, then vaguely remembered that I had looked it up earlier. And a minute later recalled that I had a similar word in the cards -- I browsed through them and found it, and guess what, repeating by the cards, I named it very easily (I guess, brain learns any cues, like cursive writing features, and cuts every corner). But this knowledge never transferred to the real language practice (at the time I was starting to write and say something sensible).
I remember taking driving exam, the theoretical test. You're given 20 questions with pictures and a question whether or not you can do a particular maneuver. Some groupmates just rote-repeated the entire 800-question set of last year's test multiple times (and learned the pictures rather than their meaning).
I instead did the homework: analyzed the entire rulebook, and where rules were irregular and chaotic, organized them in tables to bring any kind of system to this. And then I had no troubles remembering those single rules. Also, I made myself a checklist for the picture questions, what to look at -- are there lights (which have priority over signs), is there a tram (has priority, and changes passing order), and so on.
The pictures in the real test were re-drawn in different style, and sure some folks couldn't load the right answer from their brain and failed the test. One of them told me "You're so smart" (probably implying that I simply have much more RAM in the brain, which isn't true). That was pleasure to ears, but I didn't try memorizing the material at all, and knew very little of it beforehand.